The Licit Life of Capitalism is both an account of a specific capitalist project—U.S. oil companies working off the shores of Equatorial Guinea—and a sweeping theorization of more general forms and processes that facilitate diverse capitalist projects around the world. Hannah Appel draws on extensive fieldwork with managers and rig workers, lawyers and bureaucrats, the expat wives of American oil executives and the Equatoguinean women who work in their homes, to turn conventional critiques of capitalism on their head, arguing that market practices do not merely exacerbate inequality; they are made by it. People and places differentially valued by gender, race, and colonial histories are the terrain on which the rules of capitalist economy are built. Appel shows how the corporate form and the contract, offshore rigs and economic theory are the assemblages of liberalism and race, expertise and gender, technology and domesticity that enable the licit life of capitalism—practices that are legally sanctioned, widely replicated, and ordinary, at the same time as they are messy, contested, and, arguably, indefensible.

Praise

“A brilliant and deeply ethical rumination on the emancipatory potential and limitations of ethnographic critiques of capitalism, this searing ethnography delves into the very making of landscapes of exploitation and subordination. It is a theoretically and methodologically breathtaking investigation into the conditions of possibility that allow global capitalism to self-represent as ‘aboveboard’ and ‘transparent.’ By delving into the muck of what constitutes ‘the licit’ in the architecture of capitalism, Hannah Appel notices and refuses ‘comp-licit’ normative assumptions. The Licit Life of Capitalism thus achieves what few ethnographies have: it shows how capitalist abstractions are culturally deliberate and painstakingly reproduced.” — Karen Ho, author of Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street

“In this compelling and engaging work Hannah Appel ethnographically captures a big thing: capitalism as a project. Asking after the fulsomeness with which capitalism powerfully does all the things it is supposed to do, Appel sets out a new path for grappling with this dominant force in contemporary politics and economics. Her book exemplifies the best critical writing on the workings of capitalism in anthropology, geography, sociology, and allied fields.” — Bill Maurer, author of How Would You like to Pay?: How Technology is Changing the Future of Money

Open Access

Hannah Appel is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and coeditor of The Promise of Infrastructure, also published by Duke University Press, and Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas.

Funding Information This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) – a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries – and the generous support of Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, and the UCLA Library. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org.